On 11-11-2002, elian wrote thusly :
Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com writes:
We usually move hopelessly POV stuff to Meta. I vote for moving ALL the Wikipedia/foo pages there (even the geographic based categories). IMO the Wikiepdians page at en.wiki should be a alphabetic list with a link to the the chronological "history" list that states when each user joined.
No, the geographical categories are really useful. If you need an information about a country specific topic, you can ask someone there, f.e. I would even suggest to add more categories. Wikipedia has become quite anonymously. I think it would be useful for example to set up pages like "people mainly interested in philosophical topics" or "music freaks". As Wikipedia grows, we will need small communities of people working in one field together instead of individuals filling up the articles.
elian : The geographical categories seems quite useful and logical. I take your point. But let's admit that they are hardly ever used the way you are proposing. Wikiprojects or editor teams yes but it needs more discussion. As a side note there seems to be relatively little community spirit now in Wikipedia(s) ?
This would be also a step towards a more efficient dealing with "content trolls", ie. people who step in, holding obscure views and imposing their agenda onto wikipedia. One of the main problems with these people is that they get away a long time with their behavior because the people who try to control are not able to judge what is rubbish and what is not.
An example: in the German wikipedia I would love to have some economy students who could at least tell which parts of the content added by our "Freiwirtschaft"-adherent to the articles about economy are mainstream view and which need to be marked as minority view.
Don't deny people this possibility to organize!
Yes. It is a good idea but it should be given proper attention and suitable software tools. Perhaps phpBB forums, that Cuncatator has proposed, can be a temporary solution for further integration with Wikipedias and further customization.
Regards, Kpjas.